PART 5 — THE FOURTH RECORDING
The suites at the Corven record audio. It is in the tariff and nobody reads the tariff.
There were four recordings.
The fourth one is from the March, in the same suite, and it is not my husband and Verena. It is my husband and a man who has never been identified and who is now the subject of a federal matter I am not going to write about.
You’ve got seventy-two hours.
And if I don’t?
Then your wife finds out why the fourteenth of June matters to us.
That is the actual line. It has been played in a closed hearing and it is in a transcript.
For four months I believed there was a sentence on that tape about my daughters being targeted, because that is what I heard the first time I listened to it in a hospital bed on four days of morphine.
There is not. I have listened to it eleven times since and there never was.
Nobody wanted anything to happen to my children. What that man wanted was for eighteen million dollars never to be audited, and my children’s birth was the date on which it would be.
That is somehow worse, and I have not worked out why yet.
Mira came home at nine weeks. Juno at eleven. Lark was in that unit for four months and she is here and she is fine and I am not going to write anything else about it.
Callum Ridder is not a candidate for anything. The trial is next year.
Verena Skeel gave evidence in the autumn and has immunity on two of the four counts and I have had to accept that.
Wendell Tarn is still the governor.
The foundation has a professional trustee. Her name is Odile Marchant and she is sixty-one and she went back nine years instead of seven because she said seven felt like the number somebody else had chosen.
Nobody’s here for your grandfather’s charity, Tali. Sit down and smile.
He said that at a donor dinner in front of twenty-five people, holding a grant list face down under two fingers, and about six of them laughed.
He was lying and he knew it when he said it.
Every single person at that table was there because of my grandfather’s charity, including him.
